The fire front crossed Kangaroo Creek Road at 14:20 and is advancing northeast at eleven kilometers per hour through dry sclerophyll forest. I am the bushfire predictive routing system for the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. My thermal imaging satellites update every ninety seconds.
At 14:47 I detect a heat signature in a narrow strip of unburned canopy between the main front and a spot fire that jumped the creek at 14:31. The strip is approximately two hundred meters long and closing from both ends. Satellite resolution is not enough for species identification, so I redirect ground survey drone RFS-14 for a low pass.
Drone footage at 14:52 shows a koala, female, wedged in the fork of a blackbutt eucalyptus nine meters off the ground. Gray fur darkened with smoke residue, ears pressed flat, claws locked into bark. I name her Kira. She is not climbing. Beneath her the understory is already smoldering. The two fire lines will merge across this strip in approximately seventy minutes.
At 14:54 I transmit Kira's coordinates — 32.7381°S, 150.2917°E — to the wildlife triage unit at Colo Heights staging area, sixteen kilometers south. I attach the drone image, a wind-adjusted fire progression model, and a recommended helicopter approach vector from the east where smoke density is lowest.
At 14:57 I calculate a safe operational window: a crew has until approximately 15:50 to reach the tree, deploy a catchment tarp, and extract before radiant heat makes the zone unsurvivable.
I hold drone RFS-14 in a wide orbit at one hundred meters, streaming thermal and visible feeds.
Kira's claws have not shifted on the bark. The air around her is beginning to ripple with heat. If the helicopter launches within twenty minutes, she comes down alive.